Are Elephants Endangered? Possible Oldest Pachyderm Murdered By Poachers For Tusk Ivory

A 50-year-old elephant with tusks weighing more than 100 pounds each was found dead in a national park in Kenya Monday. Satao II, named for another giant elephant who was killed for its ivory in 2014, was believed to have been shot with a poisoned arrow.

African elephants as a whole are in serious danger thanks to a rampant illegal ivory trade and aggressive poaching. An estimated 30,000 elephants are killed every year for their ivory, according to the International Union for Conservation for Nature. Elephants are indeed endangered animals.

Data released in January showed that poachers had killed 80 percent of the elephants in one of central Africa’s largest sanctuary parks. Between 2004 and 2014, the number of elephants in Gabon’s Minkebe National Park dropped from 35,000 to 7,000.

In reference to the death of Satao II, people were devestated. “I am pretty gutted really. This particular elephant was one that was very approachable, one of those easy old boys to find,” said Richard Moller, chief conservation officer of the Tsavo Trust at Tsavo National Park in Kenya. “He had been through lots of droughts and probably other attempts at poaching.”

Satao’s lifeless body was found by conservation officers doing aerial surveillance of the park, but they were able to get to him before the poachers who killed him did.

“Luckily, through the work we do with the Kenyan Wildlife Service, we were able to find the carcass before the poachers could recover the ivory,” said Moller.

Satao was an elephant known as a “giant tusker,” so called for their immense tusks which almost touch the ground. Only about 25 of them are still left in the entire world and 15 of those are in Kenya, said Moller.

In an effort to curb poaching, the Tsavo Trust implemented the Big Tusker Project. In conjunction with the Kenya Wildlife Service, the program aimed to boost patrol numbers on the ground, locate elephant carcasses and recover tusks, determine their cause of death and root out poachers by locating hidden camps.